Wachovia Faces Thin Pool for CEO Search

Wachovia (WB) faces a shallow pool of candidates as it embarks on a search to replace ousted CEO Ken Thompson.

A month after Thompson was stripped of the chairman title, Wachovia went one further and asked him to resign on Monday. Wachovia Chairman Lanty Smith, who was named interim CEO, will lead the search. No clear favorite is readily apparent.

One possible Thompson successor, according to Robert Patten, a managing director and senior bank analyst at Morgan Keegan, includes Al de Molina, the former CFO of Bank of America(BAC).

"He is the only name that has star quality," Patten says, referring to names that have been associated with Wachovia.

But an investor who speaks daily to bank CEOs says de Molina is not a realistic option. "He's viewed as a joker in Charlotte, and he's from BofA -- the evil empire," the executive wrote in an email to TheStreet.com. The executive thinks Jerry Grundhofer, former chairman and CEO of US Bancorp(USB) is a possibility.

They Just Don't Get Wachovia!

Richard Bove, an analyst at Ladenburg Thalmann, told Bloomberg Television that Ben Jenkins, Wachovia's head of retail banking operations who was named interim chief operating officer Monday, might also make a logical candidate.

The remaining candidates are retired banking CEOs or candidates who came up short in the Citigroup(C) CEO derby, which was hardly viewed as a race of thoroughbreds. Of course, the Citi job was viewed as an extremely challenging one -- straightening out Wachovia is a comparative piece of cake: ride out the credit crisis and sell it to the highest bidder. Maybe JPMorgan Chase(JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon will take a crack if the bank has digested Bear Stearns by then.